Judge Death
Skills Judge Death is, predominantly, a supernatural being, and as such derives a lot of his abilities from the fact that he is no longer living. His body, though appearing emaciated, frail and almost mummy-like, is in fact highly durable; due to the lack of a functional nervous system, the vast majority of attacks will not cause the Judge pain, and will therefore be ignored as he stalks his prey. However, certain substances can cause Death immense pain; specifically, Holy Water that carries the blessing of the Pandoran Gods will hurt Death as if he were a living being subjected to acid. In addition, though his frame does not feel pain, it can be destroyed, essentially depriving Death's spirit of a host body in which to move around. He can regenerate the damage done to it, but this takes a lot of time and peace; the ritual cannot be performed when he is under attack, for example. In terms of physical ability, Death is considerably stronger and faster than a human, due to the dark magic that animates his frame and gives him his power. His hands end in sharp talonlike nails, easily capable of cutting through skin and even capable of damaging some softer metals, like iron. In addition, Judge Death can partially 'phase' through objects, as if he were immaterial, though as the effort of doing so is like tensing a muscle, he cannot manage it for long periods of time. He can also psychically sense the emotions and something of the intent of the beings around him, though he cannot sense specifics, only a general sense of what that character is feeling at the time. In their wisdom, Pandora's Gods decided that such a horrific being could not be allowed to access it's full potential, and used their own powers to lock away part of Judge Death's potency. As a result, the Judge can no longer create illusions of himself to terrorise people in several places at once, nor can he actively possess the minds and bodies of others whenever he wishes to; he can read emotion, but he cannot influence action except by manipulation. Finally, if he is robbed of his body, Death becomes a spirit, unable to influence the world around him due to his intangibility, and appearing only as a slightly condensed shadow. It takes a great effort for him to communicate with people in this state, though communicate he must, as the ritual that prepares a corpse for possession and use by Death must be performed by a corporeal being, and he cannot therefore perform it himself as a spirit. Personality Judge Death is malignant, immensely cruel and unrelentingly vicious. The vast and overwhelming obsession that drives him is his hatred of all life, regardless of form or function. The Judge's self-appointed mission is to eradicate everything with so much as a pulse, rendering the universe bare and sterile, as it was at the very beginning of it's existence. Over time, he has adopted several rationales for this genocidal outlook, the most common one being that, as life is the only thing that could commit a crime by definition in law, life itself must therefore be a crime. Though he may say this if questioned as to his motivation, the truth is actually a lot simpler and more malice-filled than he makes it out to be; Judge Death simply hates life, and resents that people believe it to have worth, or a purpose. Only in the quiet stillness of a multiverse without living things, he believes, will there finally be peace, and that is ultimately what he strives for. However, he does enjoy his work, and his actions reflect this. Judge Death will kill his victims in gruesome or painful ways, enjoying the flare of emotions as his victim passes away, and acts in certain ways to amplify this. Though, as mentioned above, he is a bit faster than the average human, he will deliberately walk in a shuffling, spastic gait, emphasising his undead nature, as he understands it to be unnerving and even terrifying to his potential victims. In addition, his wheezing, rhasping voice is also partially put on, the better to terrify people and release otherwise restrained emotion for him to enjoy. Appearance There are few beings as singularly horrific and ugly as Judge Death. Physically, his appearance is that of a tall, spindly animate corpse; his skin is a pale olive-green in colour, and is dry and leathery, as if it had been mummified or sucked dry of all it's moisture. He wears a deliberate mockery of the uniform of a Mega-City street Judge, though certain details are obviously rather different from his more reasonable counterparts; the badge, instead of being a stylised shield, is a fanged skull, the cloth deliberately resembles the plastic of a body bag, the left shoulderpad is lined with the femurs of past victims and the right one is carved to resemble a petrified winged reptile, not unlike a pterodactyl. His face, hidden behind the portcullis-like visor of his helmet, is mostly unable to be seen; however, what can be seen is a monstrous rictus grin, a leering and mirthless smile revealing yellowed and misshapen teeth. Judge Death is fairly tall, too, standing at around 6ft 4in, though this varies as he rarely stands up straight. However, his appearance is even more unnerving to most than it's physical description would suggest; most humans would shun his company - assuming he did not try to kill them on sight - simply because the Dark Judge feels wholly unnatural to be around. He is a mockery of a thing, a being that should in no way exist and yet does, and most living beings, even the ones with the most underdeveloped senses, can detect this simply by standing too close to him - i.e. within visual range of him. Needless to say, shivers down one's spine and crawling skin are just some of the symptoms of being around this abomination. Relationships Judge Death has formed a fairly cordial relationship with the Cenobite known as Pinhead, perhaps due to the torturous obsessions the other harbours, and his views that are, despite one or two points of difference, at least compatible with Death's own. In addition, he has taken on a mentor's role, as he sees it, for the banshee queen Sylvanas Windrunner, and is attempting to steer her down the path that he feels will benefit her most - that is to say, down the path that would lead her to becoming a Dark Judge like him Judge Death has not forgotten the insults inflicted upon him by Dean Winchester, and will no doubt hunt the supernaturalist down to seek revenge when he has a spare moment and inflict what the Judge sees to be appropriate revenge for his slights upon the mortal man. Judge Death has also terrorised Fran Madaraki on one occasion, abusing her desire to preserve life by whatever means necessary and killing in front of her to gain an emotional response that might satisfy his sadistic amusement. Finally, Judge Death agreed to fall in with the coalition headed by Victor Von Doom, lured by the promise of escape from Pandora and free reign to kill whosoever he chooses. The promise proved too much for the undead monster to resist, in the end. However, with the defeat of that scheme and dissolution of the conspirators, it is unlikely Death will associate with that movement any more. History Like most things that turn out to be evil, Judge Death was not always the way he is today. Indeed, he was once a perfectly normal human boy, the favoured child and only son to a travelling dentist, who preferred the boy over his more normal sister. However, as time passed, and the boy was exposed more and more to his father's apparent sadism, he began to develop the same traits as the old man, if indeed they were not already there; a distinct enjoyment of the suffering of others, coupled with a surprising intolerance for wrongdoing soon earned the growing boy some infamy amongst the local bullies, all of whom suffered rather horribly at his hands. Eventually, the boy grew into a man; a strong, tall and powerfully built man. More than that; in his youth, he had signed up to the Mega-City Judge academy of his world, and been trained until adulthood in the ways of the Judges. However, it soon became apparent that the Judge took his duties a little more seriously than his compatriots. Of all of the graduates of his class that made it to become Street Judges, none had such a record for violence against their suspects as he did, nor did anyone even come close to his record for the amount of suspects killed whilst being apprehended. Though at first, many of the hardline senior judges were willing to overlook and indeed praise such action as being decisive and no-nonsense, as the bodies piled up and the suspects came in with increasingly severe injuries, it became apparent that this particular Judge posed a problem that could no longer be ignored. When the investigation into his arrest record was made apparent to him, the Judge was beside himself with fury. Evading arrest himself, he fled the Mega-City, escaping and hiding in the depths of the city's oldest and most run-down quarter, where the other Judges were loath to follow. He was not alone in his flight, either; he had followers, disciples who believed his methods to be necessary, and even the only true way to restore order to their city. There, deep in the cavernous hollows of those ruins, the four Judges encountered a pair of sisters, the last members of a strange and dark cult. Immediately taking to them, the Judges soon came to realise that the ideology of this cult matched what they wanted to achieve, but didn't have the power to act out - the restoration of peace, not just to the City or even the world, but the entire universe. In return, they must make a huge sacrifice; they must give up their links to life. Naturally, all four of the men accepted. And so the Dark Judges were born; Fear, Fire, Mortis, and Judge Death as their leader. It was Judge Death that led their return to the Mega-City, overwhelming the massed ranks of the Judges with their newfound powers and slaughtering every single person that could not outrun them. The death toll ran into the hundreds of thousands by the second day, and by the third there was nobody left alive or willing to risk their lives to prevent the Dark Judges from reaching their objective; the Mega-City's nuclear defence system. Death himself activated the weapons array, and aimed it at the City itself, as well as every other major habitation area on the globe. With the press of a single button, he wiped out almost 4 billion people. The next half a century was spent eliminating anything that had survived the nuclear armageddon, from the few human enclaves right down to the last blade of grass. In the end, Judge Death's world knew peace, but at a horrific cost; the planet was barren and airless, and the canyons and boiled-away oceans were choked with the bleached skeletons of everything that had fallen victim to this cruel and all-encompassing doom. However, a wholly coincidental breach in the walls between realities occurred, and, peering through it curiously, Death found himself confronted with yet another Earth, this one still teeming with life. This did not bother the monster, though; it could just as easily be sterilised. However, Death and his companions did not count on one factor; the interference of a Street Judge by the name of Joseph Dredd. Dredd managed to foil Death, preventing him from murdering his friend Psi-Judge Anderson, and trapping the undead monster within a rubberlike substance known simply - and rather humiliatingly - as Boing! Unfortunately for Dredd and Mega-City One, Boing! could not hold Judge Death forever, and the Dark Judge broke free several times, each time slaughtering hundreds of the citizens Dredd was sworn to protect from such an occurence. Each time, Dredd was able to beat back the undead monster, though it soon became apparent that the problem of Judge Death would not be one that would go away soon. Eventually, in their latest conflict, Dredd was able to destroy the original host body of the creature, forcing it to retreat and find a new corpse to inhabit. However, an outside power became involved at that point. Even as his devoted Dark Judges reanimated their leader n a new body, reality cracked once again, black cords binding the recovering Judge and dragging him into the bleeding tear in space-time, despite the best efforts of his disciples to recover him from their grasp. And then he was gone, though his menace was not; now a new world would suffer the judgement of Death... Pandora History Upon arriving in Pandora, Judge Death made the tentative aquaintance of Envy, a being that did not fit within the Judge's definition of life and was thus allowed to wander more. The Judge's surprise at meeting this new being was only added to when he encountered another, similar creature just a few days afterwards. The vampire, Black Hat, showed a marked interest in the philosophies Death discussed with him, and though the dark being has seen neither of them since, he has not forgotten the potential that they showed, and the ideas they implanted within him about the use of Vampirism to raise an army. Unfortunately, his experiments with vampiric blood came to nothing, disappointing Death but not holding him back for very long. It was whilst skulking around the abandoned hotel that Judge Death first encountered Dean Winchester. It would be fair to say neither was totally prepared to face the other; though Dean was chased from the building in order to avoid Death's talons, the Judge too discovered something worrying; that holy water blessed by the Gods of Pandora could hurt him. Judge Death also made the aquaintance of Pinhead briefly in an encounter with the former Ghost Rider, before meeting him again to discuss the offer of Victor Von Doom. It was here that Death also met Sylvanas, a being that intrigued him deeply; afterwards, they met again to discuss their views on life, before both attending the meeting that Doom had forcibly summoned them both to in order to better understand what it was the Judge, for his part, was being offered in return for his services. They met once more after this, Death lured to her by the flailing psychic backlash of the man she had killed, and discussed further their surprisingly similar natures.